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FYI, Brand
-----Forwarded by Brand Niemann/DC/USEPA/US on 11/15/2007 10:54AM -----
To: CONTENT-MANAGERS-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Joe Flood <Joe.Flood@xxxxxxxx>
Date: 11/05/2007 03:01PM
Subject: How Accessible is Web 2.0 - seminar notes
Last week, I attended a seminar on the accessibility of web 2.0
technologies at the IDEAS conference. IDEAS 2007 is the Federal
government's annual conference on Section 508, presented by the GSA. I
thought my notes from the seminar might be useful for other government
web folks. I'm not a Sec. 508 expert, so if anyone else on the listserv
was at the seminar and wants to clarify or expand upon my write-up,
please do so. Here are my notes:
How Accessible is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 technologies and hosted services such as wikis, podcasts, social
networking, and blogs, are shaping how government does business,
including how their employees communicate and collaborate and how they
interact with the public. During this session, experts discussed
accessibility aspects of these technologies.
Panelists
Mary Mitchell (moderator from GSA)
Jared Smith (Web Accessibility in Media)
Phill Jenkins (IBM)
Lisa Pappas (AccessAbility SIG of the Society for Technical Communication)
Phil spoke on "The 3D Internet" and the challenges that this presents
usability practitioners. How do you make 3D environments, like Second
Life (SL), accessible for everyone? There are no Sec. 508 standards for
the 3D Internet. The standards were written for the 2D, left to right,
top to bottom, linear world of text web pages. Automated screen readers
can cope with these pages. However, how would a screen reader deal with
a 3D world like Second Life? There's too much data. How much of this
world would a screen reader describe? SL is very mouse-driven and
visual, which makes it difficult also for seniors. Deaf people would
need captions for videos and sounds. Another solution might be to have
avatar guides for the blind, to help them navigate SL.
Jared spoke on "Rich Internet Applications". He began by describing the
differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is static content,
links for more information, forms you fill out, things you click on.
Web 2.0 is dynamic content with real-time updates, things you drag,
user-centric and user-generated. Google Maps is a great example of a
Web 2.0 app. Flickr is another good example - it pushes updates from
your friends onto your Flickr page. Digg, a collaborative news service,
is another good example. In the Web 2.0 world, content is often
divorced from design. For example, if you're reading an RSS feed from a
web site in Google Reader, you don't get that site's look and feel.
Content is on the HTML level, then design is applied with CSS, then
interactivity though Ajax. This separation of content from design makes
accessibility easier.
Lisa discussed the development of accessibility standards for
"Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)". ARIA standards are in
the works. These standards will provide semantic information for
readers and other features, like keyboard shortcuts. Firefox 3 will
support these standards. They're also developing a best practices guide
for developers. In terms of accessibility, Web 2.0 applications should
be evaluated as software, not web pages.
During question time, the subject of blogs and wikis came up. The
panelists were of the opinion that blogs and wikis presented no major
accessibility problems, since they could be easily read by screen readers.
For more information, see the draft of the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines 2.0:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/
--
Joe Flood
NOAA Ocean Explorer <http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/>
NOAA's National Ocean Service
1305 East-West Highway, N/MB62
SSMC4, Suite 9165
Silver Spring, MD 20910
(301) 713-3000 x201
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